Rope Rug

Did you know you could make a rug out of a rope? Um, I didn’t either until last week. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it and just kind of filed this idea in the back of my mind for a “someday DIY”.

After taking our trip to Vallegrande for supplies and a chance to eat out (this girl never misses a chance to get away from the stove!) and spend some time with my brother, we were making our grocery rounds and were walking past a hardware store. I noticed some nice thick cream nylon twisted rope. AHH!!!! The rug rope diy coming flooding into my mind! I immediately stopped with Lily holding my hand and Tyler toting Landon and asked how much per meter for the rope. My wheels were turning, but I decided I would keep this in mind and not do anything just yet.

So we moved along.

Five stores down and I noticed the same rope and asked her price. A tad more than the other stall. Then Tyler noticed a big role of hemp rope sitting in the back. The price was right and low-and-behold Tyler told the lady we needed 100 meters. I was kind of shocked! Tyler was the first to move on this once I told him about the rug possibilities. And I was sort of thinking “Are you crazy- thats ALOT of rope! We’ll have such a massive rug!”

Am I glad we bought that amount… because it wasn’t as much as I thought. It did make such a nice little rug though and I want to make another one or add on 100 meters more to make it huge (And impossibly heavy to move. Ah, Oh well!!)

Here’s what we did.

All you need is the rope and a hot glue gun and plenty of glue sitcks. (This is a 100 count mini glue stick bag.)

At first we dropped a cloth down and used that as our work surface, which worked ok, until the rug was getting pretty large and hard to slide around with the sheet constantly crinkling up and getting in the way. Not necessary if your working on a hard floor like concrete or tile. We ditched the sheet and things were much easier!

Tyler got this started for me by cutting the end of the rope at an angle, and I put quite a bit of hot glue to get all the little frayed edges in place for the beginning of the spiral.

For the first 12 meters of rope we did a continuess hot glue edge. After that I glued pea size bits every couple inches or less.

To finish the edge nicely and not too noticeably, again, cut the end of the rope at an angle with the angled cut edge being glued directly facing into the rope. Use lots of hot glue to be sure this isn’t going to fray.

Coasters , place mats, wall art, or hot pads to place on your table -there are so many options out there you can make with this.

And this is all there is to it. I’m debating on adding clear silicone to the back of this just for an extra binder. It’s very well put together right now, but I want this to hold up for the long haul. So that may be something I will be doing next to this rug. Skidding is not a problem with this rug because it’s so heavy, and the silicone wouldn’t be helping as far as making it nonskid. The pros are that it will add years to its life, but the con is that I won’t have a rug I can flip over if I need to. Ah, we’ll see!